Hi, As it is now in the EPEL package update process the testing phase takes 14 days (double of Fedora). My impression is that this testing phase is quite long and unhelpful for the following reasons:
1. The majority of people who use EPEL are not Fedora users. They are more likely to report a bug they encounter, in CentOS forums (or RHEL) rather than understand fedora process and the need for karma.
2. The testing-imposed delay does not help detecting failures such as a library ABI breakage as in: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1411021 My guess is that these systems upgrade on even slower cycle than 14 days (it may even be the RHEL/Centos cycles).
Most likely only then an issue will be spotted and the 14-day delay prevents from providing fast a fix.
I do not have any good suggestion, other than reducing the long period of testing to the Fedora defaults (7 days). A better approach would be to tie more to centos processes, and allow centos registered users to give karma and test, but I have no idea how feasible it is, and whether centos users will actually get involved in EPEL.
regards, Nikos
[0]. https://bodhi.fedoraproject.org/updates/FEDORA-EPEL-2017-63c298b073
On Tue, Jan 17, 2017 at 04:11:31PM +0100, Nikos Mavrogiannopoulos wrote:
- The majority of people who use EPEL are not Fedora users. They are
more likely to report a bug they encounter, in CentOS forums (or RHEL) rather than understand fedora process and the need for karma.
Can we help steer those people into understanding Bodhi? It's not like a deep knowledge of all things Fedora is required.
I do not have any good suggestion, other than reducing the long period of testing to the Fedora defaults (7 days). A better approach would be to tie more to centos processes, and allow centos registered users to give karma and test, but I have no idea how feasible it is, and whether centos users will actually get involved in EPEL.
I think we should be able to do federated authentication with CentOS and accept CentOS accounts as valid for meaningful karma. But I'd really rather encourage just getting Fedora accounts and helping draw people who are in the Fedora community though EPEL into more close connections.
On Tue, 2017-01-17 at 12:07 -0500, Matthew Miller wrote:
On Tue, Jan 17, 2017 at 04:11:31PM +0100, Nikos Mavrogiannopoulos wrote:
- The majority of people who use EPEL are not Fedora users. They
are more likely to report a bug they encounter, in CentOS forums (or RHEL) rather than understand fedora process and the need for karma.
Can we help steer those people into understanding Bodhi? It's not like a deep knowledge of all things Fedora is required.
I usually get issues related to EPEL on upstream (issue tracker or mailing list). I have referred the reporters either to use EPEL bugzilla or bodhi itself if I knew there was a fix.
With this approach, I have noticed that some (quite few) of the users did register to report a bug with bugzilla, but no-one ever had left feedback on bodhi (even if they had reported the bug).
Let's see what is the process for these users. 1. They register on the bugzilla 2. They report a bug in EPEL 3. The see something like: "ocserv-0.11.6-2.el7 has been submitted as an update to Fedora EPEL 7. https://bodhi.fedoraproject.org/updates/FEDORA-EPEL-2016-8e42046775"
No info there what to do, so I guess some will click this link to find the rpms.
4. They click
The screen on the above link has some information on the fix itself, the bug addressed, and a very small link to the rpms at the 'Builds' line.
I guess if they can find the link to the rpms (to be honest I couldn't on my first visit to the new interface), they would download the RPMs and never come back.
There is no information there indicating that they need to leave feedback for this update. The feedback form is way below the page (I needed to scroll down, and the Karma keyword although visible I am pretty sure its meaning is clear only to existing Fedora users/devels).
5. Few days later the bug will be updated with: "ocserv-0.11.6-2.el7 has been pushed to the Fedora EPEL 7 testing repository. If problems still persist, please make note of it in this bug report. See https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/QA:Updates_Testing for instructions on how to install test updates. You can provide feedback for this update here: https://bodhi.fedoraproject.org/updates/FEDORA-EPEL-2016-8e42046775 "
To understand what this cryptic message means one has to click the link in QA:Updates_Testing. If one tries these generic instructions in EPEL, he will notice that they don't work. One needs to replace dnf with yum. As both packager's names are meaningless for the average person that may or may not be obvious.
While some of these users will read the links to generic instructions that was posted, and do things right, most will not (in my experience none reached that point). An improvement would be not to link to generic instructions but post specific instructions for the component fixed. How to install and how to leave feedback. At this moment my impression is that we are posting links to bugzilla and we expect the users to educate themselves.
regards, Nikos
Good luck with that ! :) Regards
De : Nikos Mavrogiannopoulos nmav@redhat.com À : EPEL Development List epel-devel@lists.fedoraproject.org Envoyé le : Mercredi 18 janvier 2017 10h39 Objet : [EPEL-devel] Re: rethinking the epel testing
On Tue, 2017-01-17 at 12:07 -0500, Matthew Miller wrote: and we expect the users to educate themselves.
regards, Nikos _______________________________________________ epel-devel mailing list -- epel-devel@lists.fedoraproject.org To unsubscribe send an email to epel-devel-leave@lists.fedoraproject.org
On Wed, Jan 18, 2017 at 10:39:14AM +0100, Nikos Mavrogiannopoulos wrote:
To understand what this cryptic message means one has to click the link in QA:Updates_Testing. If one tries these generic instructions in EPEL, he will notice that they don't work. One needs to replace dnf with yum. As both packager's names are meaningless for the average person that may or may not be obvious.
It's a wiki, so that can be fixed.... I've added a brief "EPEL" section to that page. Feel free to improve it.
While some of these users will read the links to generic instructions that was posted, and do things right, most will not (in my experience none reached that point). An improvement would be not to link to generic instructions but post specific instructions for the component fixed. How to install and how to leave feedback. At this moment my impression is that we are posting links to bugzilla and we expect the users to educate themselves.
That's probably true. What else can we do to improve that?
On 17 January 2017 at 12:07, Matthew Miller mattdm@fedoraproject.org wrote:
On Tue, Jan 17, 2017 at 04:11:31PM +0100, Nikos Mavrogiannopoulos wrote:
- The majority of people who use EPEL are not Fedora users. They are
more likely to report a bug they encounter, in CentOS forums (or RHEL) rather than understand fedora process and the need for karma.
Can we help steer those people into understanding Bodhi? It's not like a deep knowledge of all things Fedora is required.
I do not have any good suggestion, other than reducing the long period of testing to the Fedora defaults (7 days). A better approach would be to tie more to centos processes, and allow centos registered users to give karma and test, but I have no idea how feasible it is, and whether centos users will actually get involved in EPEL.
I think we should be able to do federated authentication with CentOS and accept CentOS accounts as valid for meaningful karma. But I'd really rather encourage just getting Fedora accounts and helping draw people who are in the Fedora community though EPEL into more close connections.
There are several problems with this:
1) Getting an account is seen by many people as the same as taking an oath of allegiance. They get angry when they only joined a group to report some problem and then see that their joining is used in some other promo that the groups user base has grown by N amount because there are more registered users. They are 'CentOS' users not Fedora users.
2) This belief that signing up is an oath of allegiance goes both ways. Some Fedora packagers and users expect that any problem reported for a package should be only 'fixed' if it shows up in the latest Fedora release. They see that a person has a Fedora account and they say "Why aren't you using Fedora instead of that claptrap OS."
3) Finally Fedora and CentOS are worlds apart in what they want. EL-6 is the largest usebase and is still growing. That means people are wanting things that will work on Fedora 12. Many have no idea or want to deal with containers, modules, and are just trying to get their head around systemd which they will probably be rolling out in the next 4 years (though some are hoping it will get replaced by Linus with a git like better tool). Fedora people are starting to show signs of being tired of containers and are trying to figure out the next big thing to work on.
Now while it would be nice to get them to talk together more.. most of the time the only useful conversations seem to happen over beer and dinner.. while email lists turn into tribal fights of slights and sarcasm.
On Wed, Jan 18, 2017 at 11:48:14AM -0500, Stephen John Smoogen wrote:
- Getting an account is seen by many people as the same as taking an
oath of allegiance. They get angry when they only joined a group to report some problem and then see that their joining is used in some other promo that the groups user base has grown by N amount because there are more registered users. They are 'CentOS' users not Fedora users.
I have two things to say to this. First, this is a misperception. EPEL is part of Fedora; EPEL users are Fedora users.
Second, I don't think that this is generally a problem with CentOS users, who tend to be pragmatic rather than loyalists.
- This belief that signing up is an oath of allegiance goes both
ways. Some Fedora packagers and users expect that any problem reported for a package should be only 'fixed' if it shows up in the latest Fedora release. They see that a person has a Fedora account and they say "Why aren't you using Fedora instead of that claptrap OS."
Do you have an example of that, or is it just a worry that it *might* happen? I know of many cases where Fedora packagers don't want to take on the commitment of maintaining an EPEL package, but for those who have, if this is their response, they should probably rethink that.
- Finally Fedora and CentOS are worlds apart in what they want. EL-6
is the largest usebase and is still growing. That means people are wanting things that will work on Fedora 12. Many have no idea or want to deal with containers, modules, and are just trying to get their head around systemd which they will probably be rolling out in the next 4 years (though some are hoping it will get replaced by Linus with a git like better tool). Fedora people are starting to show signs of being tired of containers and are trying to figure out the next big thing to work on.
Sure, at least to some degree. But I don't think that's hugely relevant to this particular thing.
Now while it would be nice to get them to talk together more.. most of the time the only useful conversations seem to happen over beer and dinner.. while email lists turn into tribal fights of slights and sarcasm.
That's probably more a matter of having gotten the right people to the beer and dinner situation and not having done so in email.
epel-devel@lists.fedoraproject.org
-
john tatt -
Matthew Miller -
Nikos Mavrogiannopoulos -
Stephen John Smoogen